Me and Chuck came up together. Deployed young to Iraq, where we learned everything they don’t teach you about war in training, then to Afghanistan, where we learned everything about war we’d missed in Iraq. Then, back to Iraq, where we’d made names for ourselves as a sniper team—I was the shooter, he was the spotter. After word got around that we knew our business they sent us on deeper missions. We saw “peaceful” countries as part of ad hoc Task Forces. The kind of operations you don’t read about in newspapers until months or years afterward, with guys from Delta Force and the CIA. Missions where you almost might have been on another planet, for all anyone knew.
When the only friendly faces you see for months are American, those faces mean something different from what they did before. Too, America takes on a significance that it hadn’t. You learn that some places on earth are nothing like Philadelphia, where I’m from. And while Chuck grew up in the Deep South, called himself a “good-ol’ boy,” I remember many times when his broad, ruddy face widened, his eyebrows arching at some unexpected new vision, like the time we found a group of children butchering a camel with machetes in a courtyard, or the two-sided ambush by Sudanese Bedouin we’d scraped through outside Halayeb, the southernmost tip of Egypt, driving in a pickup truck alongside a convoy of Egyptian soldiers. After, we’d climbed out of the cab and examined the doors, which were so riddled with bullet holes they’d looked like cheese graters—yet neither of us had been hit or even grazed. A miracle. Moments like those, Chuck’s deep drawl made more opaque from the wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, he’d whistle, low, and say something like, “Never seen that be-foar,” voicing his thoughts so I didn’t have to say mine.
In America, we’d been about as different as they come, but over there, those differences were insignificant when placed against the extraordinary spectacles to which we’d become the audience.
Our first deployment together was back in 2005, when Ramadi went sour. That’s where we gelled as a team, when he got me through my first big ordeal as a sniper, as a soldier. We were providing overwatch for a convoy of tanks. You wouldn’t think tanks needed a couple guys with rifles to protect them, but insurgency plays out on the margins—and Iraqi fighters were crafty. It was summer, and hot so the air made everything slick. We were lying on a factory roof scanning for insurgents in places we’d have gone if we were in their position. A thousand meters out, on a low, desert hill, we spotted two black-hooded beebs by a beaten-up dirtbike. They were waiting for the convoy, one bent over a detonating device fiddling with the trigger, the other holding a thick pair of field binoculars. The tanks rumbled and squeaked along the road like a World War II movie.
Higher cleared us to engage. I nailed the triggerman immediately but hesitated for a clean shot on the lookout, who ducked as I fired, one of the only times I aimed and missed. The tanks were approaching an intersection and Chuck was yelling at them over the radio to stop. The lookout activated the IED as I cleared the rifle’s chamber for another round. Unobserved, purely by chance, the bomb caught the lead tank full on and flipped it up and over like a toy, spinning high into the air. Its turret popped off, something human fell out, and then everything was bouncing over the earth. I’d never felt a blast like that before. It shook everything.
After Chuck died, I couldn’t shoot worth shit. For snipers, that’s a problem. I’d be out on mission staring down terrorists through a high-tech scope and instead of opening fire, I’d watch them dig bombs into the road. I always found an excuse why there wasn’t a shot, and people started to notice.
Up to that point I’d been one of the best snipers the SEALs had. My thing was always hitting my targets and putting them down, no matter the distance or difficulty. If I pulled the trigger, the cunt on the other end was either dying, or getting hurt so bad they’d wish they had. During the bad time when I wasn’t shooting, my stellar record gave me latitude with superiors, made the SEALs think twice about switching me off.
That’s the military. You earn your stripes, you make your bones, you prove yourself, and they won’t just throw you away. Still, it got to where they were talking about putting me behind a desk or sending me stateside to train other snipers. Grounding me. And once you’re off the line, it’s hell getting back.
My father never served. When I was younger I watched Full Metal Jacket and after, asked why he didn’t join, and he said Vietnam was already over by the time he was old enough to fight. Later on, I figured out that the timing didn’t quite work out—he could’ve joined, and seen action, so he must’ve had some other reason.
Paradoxically, the only skill my father had was shooting, and unsurprisingly, he loved it. He was short, bow-legged, and what you’d call “barrel-chested,” barely resembling me except his eyes were grey too. He was taciturn and aloof, but sometimes when he drank or felt low he would tell me that grey eyes were the sign of a marksman. He worked part-time and managed to make ends meet, but there was a stubborn core that prevented him from seeing himself subordinated to anyone. There was a kind of dam inside my father, a stoppage that kept him from taking risks or going beyond himself. If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he was calm and collected.
So money was always tight. My father couldn’t afford to buy a television, and starting when I was young, maybe five or six, he’d take me hunting. He taught me the proper way to take aimed shots, to squeeze the trigger during a long deliberate exhale, not knowing the precise moment the rifle would fire, teaching me that expectation ruins accuracy. After, he’d put me to work disassembling and cleaning his rifle, shotguns, and pistols. It’s not that he was a gun nut—quite the contrary. He tried to share the one thing he loved with me, and I suppose I felt lucky. Many people had it worse. I wasn’t particularly popular then, and didn’t have many friends, so physical labor helped keep me busy.
When I go home now, people love my war stories. Guys I barely knew in high school ask about how many terrorists I killed (fifty-seven), and all about the Navy SEALs. For some reason people are interested in mundane biographical details about SEALs that weren’t relevant or significant before, like how I’m six feet one with light blond hair and grey eyes, or how I have long arms and narrow shoulders, and bent, powerful legs. I can climb a twenty-five-foot rope in five seconds. I’ve died underwater before, part of S.C.U.B.A. training. I’m a fast runner, and I can do more push-ups or pull-ups than you’d think.
In high school I hated class and homework but I was good at sports. The humanities were my worst subjects. Usually I’d read a book and just not understand what was going on. Freshman year I almost failed English. Math and science were strong subjects for me, but the humanities really tripped me up. It seemed like I was the only kid in class who couldn’t figure out what was happening in a book, no matter how hard I tried. My advisor tried to help, and said something I’ll never forget: that reading was about what called out to you. A great book showed you something true about yourself. It helped, some, to hear that. Even so, in English I’d think I understood a book or a story, saw something true in it, but then in class I’d raise my hand and it’d turn out that I was wrong.
Right before freshman year, an important event helped define my adolescence. Our neighbors, an elderly couple, died. The estate sold their house to Mr. and Mrs. Erik Ruhr and their daughter, Angela. Angela Ruhr was a senior, and her curly blond hair demanded and received the attention of all who regarded it. She was a terrific athlete, and had the kind of body every high school boy coveted. Her father was a banking executive.
By happy coincidence, her second-story bedroom room was adjacent to mine. Most nights she remembered to pull the blinds shut. There were weekends, especially the summer after her graduation, where she did not remember . . . I was able to observe her, on dates with one boy or another, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and, on several occasions, having enthusiastic sex. Her parents spent a good deal of time away on vacation or for professional reasons, and often left Angela to her own devices.
I did not have a girlfriend and developed what in retrospect I can admit was an obsession with Angela’s sexual habits. Quite apart from the objective fact that watching an attractive woman have sex is engaging (pornographic films and strip clubs attest to this), my own life then was drab and boring by comparison, and static.
One morning that July I walked out back. Dad was gone, and there was nothing to do around the house. The weather was comfortable. I could smell the cut grass and fully bloomed trees. Insects buzzed. The air was still, not yet humid, blasted with life and fecundity. I looked up to find Angela watching from her back porch. She pointed her index finger and pretended to shoot me, like it was a pistol, then smiled, waved, and walked inside. I raised my hand, which is to say, I did nothing.
As an introvert, I honed extraordinary powers of patience and endurance those July and August evenings waiting by my window for Angela to return from dates with boys from my high school, as well as those from other high schools. I did not film or record these sexual acts, and understood that my observing them was intrusive. But I could not stop, nor could I furnish a reasonable explanation to myself for doing so beyond fascination.
Unlike Angela’s parents, it seemed like my father was always home. We lived in closer quarters than the Ruhrs. My father was no banking executive, and privacy was difficult to come by. One had to be furtive. So in addition to powers of patience, I also developed methods for gratifying my sexual urges without arousing the suspicions of those around me. Nevertheless, my father seemed to have a sixth sense for my masturbation, and while he never caught me in the act, he seemed especially intrusive during those times when I would have preferred to be alone, banging on my locked door, calling out about dinner, asking what I was up to. Achieving climax involved a delicate triangulation of the following variables: Angela’s sexual life, my father’s intrusiveness, and my ability both to secure my privacy in physical terms as well as psychologically to feel comfortable and safe. Practically speaking, this was quite difficult. For what it’s worth, I do believe that this all helped me cultivate the skills that ultimately led to my success as a sniper.
After high school most people went to college. Angela attended Duke. I didn’t have the grades or interest. In 2002, war was the only thing that “called out” to me after high school. Putting my father’s hypothesis about grey eyes to the test, I joined the Navy SEALs and the rest, as they say, is history.
Occasionally I wonder where Angela Ruhr ended up. She never appeared on social media—not everyone does. For a while I checked Facebook and Twitter, as I checked MySpace and Friendster when those were active. I’d Google her name—you’d think one of the friends we had in common would bring her up—nothing. After leaving for college, it’s like she dropped off the face of the earth.
Sniping comes down to (1) patience, (2) procedures that if you do them right it will give you the same result, and (3) luck, because even the best sniper can miss shots at greater distances. After Ramadi and the tank I had the most trouble reconciling myself with (3), but Chuck helped get me past that anxiety. He pointed out—and I can’t disagree with him—that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.
Now, when there’s a shot, I don’t hesitate. I don’t think about whether or not I’ll be ready to fire. Whether the bullet might pull left or right. What the shot “means”—its significance, my surroundings, the architectural composition of the neighborhood and likely historical ramifications of that architecture, as well as my embeddedness in the consequences that will spiderweb out unpredictably into the future like cracks in a window punctured by 7.62 caliber bullets. Now, I bed down and take the shot.
I like to think of myself as a scientist, tending to the various parts of my laboratory. Twisting dials, pulling levers. That’s all there is to it, it’s simple. When the conditions align, I make the shot. No hesitation, and to hell with luck, like Chuck said. When everything is done scientifically and objectively, according to routine, that’s all you can do. I’ve made the shot about seventy-five times, taken targets down, fifty-nine of them permanently.
As I mentioned earlier, Chuck and I couldn’t have been more different. We were partners on five consecutive deployments. He’d get emotional on mission. When I made my longest shot (over 1.5 kilometers, through a building, RPG gunner) he jumped and yelled. The war meant something to him that I never understood. I joined because I wanted to learn about my family, and I thought I might have a talent for shooting targets at long distances. Chuck had joined, I think, because he hated Muslims. When I dropped the RPG gunner, for example, after jumping to his feet he, yelled, “Fuck you, haji,” then swung his hips in a circle while playing the air guitar, like David Lee Roth in “Jump,” smiling down at me and nodding to a beat I couldn’t hear. I was impressed with the shot as well. There had been a stiff cross-breeze, burning with dust, and thinking about it afterward, I was surprised it hit target.
Me and Chuck were together so long our luck became one person’s luck instead of two, which is to say, it ran out.
Chuck looked out for me in more ways than one. In addition to guaranteeing our safety on mission, he could talk our superiors into giving us autonomy. Our lieutenant who didn’t care for me—reminded me a bit of my father, always checking up on my room, always around when I wanted to be alone, never a kind word. Chuck understood how to deal with guys like that.
Another thing that happened to me at war was I started getting off on the more difficult shots at night. Sexually. We’d be on a mission, waiting for the target to appear or for some variable in the environment to change and I’d know Chuck was out there keeping watch—it made me feel really comfortable, knowing we were the ones with the power to kill. I’d see the target as a white blob, engaged in all kinds of personal and intimate acts, and it reminded me—there was no helping it—of Angela, of my childhood window. Except nobody could interrupt us, the only thing that would break the spell would be the crack of my rifle spitting out someone’s judgment. In that darkness, I figured out how to stimulate myself. At least, until Chuck bought the farm, at which point, it didn’t.
Here’s what happened. As spotter, it was Chuck’s job to pull security and help maintain our situational awareness. One mission in Iraq he was covering our six from the roof while I pulled overwatch on an Al Qaeda organizer. One of Zarqawi’s acolytes, this guy wasn’t holding the drill, as it were, wasn’t using the calipers himself, but he was definitely green lighting the monsters who were. We were waiting for him to come home, and he did, and right when I had my shot and started to squeeze the trigger Chuck said “abort, abort” over the radio.
He’d seen the target’s security detail one rooftop over from ours and was assessing the situation, probably thinking there was no way to do the mission. All of that was irrelevant because I’d been thinking about Angela and getting ready for the shot. Physically I couldn’t control it, even if I’d wanted to. I let myself go, and took the shot, and capped the poor bastard.
Chuck nailed the first couple ragheads but (and I don’t even know where it came from, we were taking fire from all over) someone shot him dead through his helmet, bang. I bustled him over my shoulders and ran, as Chuck’s blood poured over my shoulders and arms and pants, dousing everything. I made it back through a mysterious blur of jumping and firing without shooting at anything, and at some point a helicopter was landing and grabbing me and Chuck—Chuck’s body. Then it was over.
Nobody asked how the mission had gone down, and I didn’t tell, I just slowly went to shit as a sniper, unable to shoot, unable to gratify myself as my sexual frustration built.
I was back in rotation the next day. They assigned me a few spotters but none of them worked out. In the military, you bond with someone or you don’t, and I’d gotten too content with Chuck—I’d stopped being flexible enough to adapt. My habits, with which Chuck was familiar, grated on the other spotters. Didn’t matter that I had a solid reputation, everyone with experience has a way of doing things and I couldn’t seem to find anyone who gelled with my particular needs. One spotter would get too close, always set up next to me. Another was too far, I couldn’t tell if I was safe or not. Missions went badly and sometimes not at all, sometimes targets would escape without getting shot. This went on for a couple weeks.
One evening I was going half crazy lying in my room, thinking that something had to give, when a distinctive rapping at my door brought me to attention—the lieutenant. I popped out of bed, anxious and on edge.
“Sir?” I said, but flat, so he understood that I didn’t really care. He was in full battle rattle, helmet, body armor, rifle, all of it, which meant something dangerous was imminent.
“Just got back from a recon—we’re heading out tonight. Got a target. Come with me to CHOPs for briefing.”
I didn’t understand at first. All the spotters were out, or, all the spotters who might still work with me.
“I’m going to be your spotter. Heard you have constipation when it comes to getting your shot off. I’m the laxative.”
He was tall, and older—twenty-nine or thirty. He’d been a soldier like myself at some point, and done the whole green to gold officer transition at Georgetown. Got an undergraduate degree in business—not exactly the “tactical” type, more comfortable signing paperwork than spending a night outside staring at targets. I was surprised he’d decided to join me and said so.
“Don’t worry if this idea is good or not, it’s happening. Come with me, I’m not going to say it a third time.”
I did as instructed, pulling on my boots and body armor. The lieutenant was already walking down the hall, toward “operations,” the office where high-level briefings occurred. I hurried to catch up. We pulled even as he reached the door, and he turned before opening it.
“The target is special. It’s a female. Can’t afford to have you fuck this one up. Got it?”
I nodded. I’d done females before, older women who were acting as go-betweens for AQ leaders, pulling important financial strings. Didn’t bother me, really. If the generals and admirals in the head-shed wanted some lady taken out, that meant the target deserved it. The lieutenant, though, he bothered me, with his cheerful eyes and empty, authoritative manner, like he knew the score.
Objective Redskins was the name higher assigned, in keeping with their convention of designating targets with the names of football teams. It seemed appropriate: Redskins were what Army scouts killed on the prairie and in the American Southwest to stop settlers from losing their scalps. Savage people, in a lawless land. Removing Redskins would allow this particular city, and Iraq in general, to evolve into a place like Phoenix, or Des Moines. Or Philadelphia.
At the briefing, we reviewed the hide site our scouts had selected. It didn’t look promising—even under normal conditions, it looked like a tough shot. Corner building, angled fire, two-floor differential from four hundred meters away—but there was no other option. I would’ve rather taken a longer shot from an equal elevation and clear line of sight, but Redskins had selected quarters masked by two tall, intervening factories. Unlike Angela, Redskins had thought about who might be observing. I kept snapping in and out of the actual brief, instead scanning the photos, memorizing the physical details of the area.
“Medevac plan is—primary, create improvised Helicopter Landing Zone on the roof marked using flares and smoke. Alternate will be in the courtyard to south of hide sight, marking same as for primary.” The lieutenant hurried through the briefing in a monotone, shifting from foot to foot and frequently sneaking his eyes to the right, affecting the speech patterns of a seasoned combat veteran, like he had the whole thing figured out. He didn’t fool me, I could tell he’d never been in the shit. Nobody ever tagged a rooftop as primary evacuation, that was movie-time cowboy crap. What it really meant was that a bureaucrat was coming out with me—that the mission was my last chance to make good. I picked up the packet to review the details, not wanting to get anything wrong, and left to finish prepping.
“See you in three hours outside your hooch,” the lieutenant said as I left. “Zero one hundred hours, we link up with our infil. Don’t be late.”
I rezeroed my rifle and double-checked the equipment. I was still jittery, full of pent-up fury that bounced my legs when I sat, and propelled me down empty hallways when I stood. I hit the gym briefly, but that just got my heart rate up. With nothing left to do but wait for a half hour, I decided to loiter, see if I could endure nothing. Took my stuff outside my quarters and waited.
Outside, the night reminded me of childhood Halloween—chilly and dark, with a vivid moon, yellow in the squat Iraqi sky. Smells sharpened in the autumn air, and I felt the tainted Euphrates reeking like an ache, from the back of my skull down to my throbbing pelvis. Dogs barked desperately off to the East in Sadr City. Somewhere outside the wire, a man yelled in Arabic. The call to prayer wasn’t playing, but I knew it would, again, soon.
The lieutenant found me there. I grabbed my rifle and pack and we linked up with a group of Army infantrymen heading out to our sector in Strykers—whisper-quiet armored vehicles. We rode in their red-lit troop compartments for hours, doing false inserts around the city, setting up snap traffic checkpoints with the infantry, pretending that our purpose was tactical, quotidian. When we finally reached the drop point it was early morning. Our infiltration went off without a hitch. We exited the back of a slow-rolling Stryker as we passed an alley three hundred meters away from the apartment building that held our hide location, and humped it the rest of the way, dogs barking at the vehicles, at us, at each other.
Usually, the topographical setup of a fight is worse on the ground than on the maps they use during briefs. The hill where you want to put a sniper or machine gun ends up being a mountain. An open space through which one is supposed to shoot is actually an apple orchard, or a children’s playground. Sometimes, though, if intel is sparse, you catch a break, and the setup is better than you feared. As it turned out, the room where I’d take my shot wasn’t as bad as it looked in the mission brief—very doable, with a great egress route for after. I took a moment to marvel at how the lieutenant and I were, shortly, to transform this humble apartment, guarded by a cheap metal door, into a workshop. The concrete walls were weak and chipped, the furniture shabby but maintained in a way that reminded me of my own impoverished upbringing. I felt a momentary surge of welcome familiarity.
The lieutenant answered my first concern by settling in at the far end of the apartment’s living room, about twenty feet away. He wouldn’t be bothering me by breathing over my shoulder. As I arranged furniture so I could take up a good position in the prone looking out the window, I noticed that my body was still jumpy. I was on edge, and focusing on the variables wasn’t helping like normal.
For this mission, I’d brought a Jellico .303, that long-range rifle produced by the reliable manufacturers at Winchester. The lieutenant was on the thermals, and in addition had a Leopold scope that could zoom up to x25 magnification. We kept the target’s rooms under observation from early morning until the sun came up, then waited several hours for the sun to slouch across the sky. Shooting from the West, we needed the sun to line up. At 1400 the light was perfect, so I returned to my scope and waited, scanning the target’s bedroom and living room windows.
It all reminded me of a movie I’d watched once, set in the 1970s. A police officer was tracking some serial killer in San Francisco. I couldn’t remember the details. The serial killer had threatened—a newspaper?—to kill someone—a homosexual?—and had taken up a position on a roof. I think the policeman—also a sniper?—was trying to outmaneuver the serial killer. Everything was in sepia, that washed-out quality you get with older movies. The soundtrack was really arresting, peppy, funky. But I couldn’t remember, in Iraq, watching for Redskins, how it had all turned out.
At 1450 the target appeared briefly by the bedroom window, too quickly for me to acquire a good shot. Redskins had her arms around a young adolescent boy of twelve or thirteen, and kissed him repeatedly on the forehead before shooing him out, closing the door behind him. She placed her hands on her hips, and looked out the window, her face open to the daylight. I had her, and prepared to fire.
The lieutenant whistled, low. “Hey. You seeing this?”
“What?” I looked up.
“Look at this chick. She’s blazing. Packet did not do her justice.”
I brought myself back to the scope, and evaluated. Sure enough, Objective Redskins was a very attractive woman. The photo in the packet had been unexceptional—and while this was the same long, narrow face and nose, the moves were all different, her bearing refined, regal. The human potential of Redskins unnerved me. Our target was an arrogant killer, an evil sadist who unquestionably deserved death. She was also a sexy mother.
“What do you recommend, sir,” I said. “That’s the target, I’m sure. Mission is to take it down.”
Glancing at the target through his spotting scope, the lieutenant abruptly leaned forward and grabbed it with both hands, bringing his eyes up to the near end. “Holy shit, take a look. You’re not going to believe this.”
I already knew what I’d see, and my scalp and forehead started to sweat. Under my crosshairs Objective Redskins was removing articles of her clothing. Below her burka and headscarf lay a shapely body, clad only in lacy red panties and a bra. She was beautiful. In my peripheral vision, I noted that the lieutenant had unbuckled his pants and thrust his right hand into them, all the while observing through the scope that he held with his left. I returned to Redskins, who was practically nude. Of its own volition, my manhood stirred.
“Sir, this isn’t a call we get to make. You saw the photos in the packet—this human has done things, horrible things, and our mission, again, is to take her down.”
The lieutenant wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t shoot without him, I needed his approval to fire, and moreover he was there to help me shoot, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do, take the shot, get it over with. Instead, he was masturbating furiously in the corner while an insurgent commander was defenseless, easy for the taking. I waited while Redskins went to her closet and took out various types of clothing, putting them up against her body in front of a mirror.
After a little while he stopped. “This isn’t doing it for me.” He sat up, his pants still unbuckled. “I’m bored, fuck this shit. You gonna shoot or what?”
I maintained my composure, careful not to roll my eyes or otherwise indicate my disgust for him, for this whole scene, and took aim again. When I returned to the scope, though, Redskins had another surprise.
A beatific smile on her face, she was leaning back on her bed, swaying. She placed her hand down her panties, and began stimulating herself. I shifted uncomfortably as my crotch stiffened, trying to dispel the exquisite, painful urge. My prone position made it impossible to avoid arousing myself with even the slightest gesture. Carefully, I brought the crosshairs to her chest, a few clicks down from her left armpit. My finger drifted to the trigger.
“You paying attention? Do it! Take the goddamned shot!”
Taking the shot now, as much as I wanted to, was clearly not what was called for. “Sir, you’re going to want to take a look at this,” I said.
“This better be good,” he said, then, “Jackpot, total game changer!” His face back on the scope and hand back in his pants, he rendered his decision: “Hold fire.”
I gritted my teeth, rocking back and forth, like an animal, powerless to prevent myself from rubbing myself with my legs. Redskins’ knees were delicately circling as her feet and heels hung in the air, bouncing lightly, and I’d unconsciously synchronized my movements with her own. Then it happened—I finished, at almost the same time as the lieutenant. A great calm washed over me, calm like I hadn’t felt since before Chuck’s death. My facial tic vanished, and my arms stopped shaking. My legs stopped their macabre rattle.
After a long minute, still looking through his scope, the lieutenant spoke. “You ever listen to Rachmaninov? Second Piano Concerto?”
I had not (though I have since) and said so.
“Ayn Rand said it’s the only piece of music a man needs to know,” he said. “You have a girl back home?”
I did, but I was thinking about Angela. “No, sir,” I said, then, “Yes, actually. I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”
“Asian girl, right?”
“Roger, sir,” I said.
He nodded sagely, then left the scope, lay back against the wall, and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Seems like your type, the quiet ones always get yellow fever. Want one?”
I declined his offer, and he lit up, wiping his wrist on the concrete floor. “Man that’s messy as fuck,” he said to himself, then launched into a story about how he’d gone hunting for elk in Wyoming on vacation once, with his dad and grandfather. Naturally, the lieutenant was the protagonist, and naturally, they’d bagged a massive beast, a record-setter. It sounded like bullshit to me, but sometimes that’s how people talk in war. I kept checking the room, and spoke up when he finished the story.
“Sir, should I shoot? She’s still at it.”
The lieutenant dragged on his cigarette, pretentious in profile. “Sure, knock her down. I mean might want to let her finish first.”
He was right. The mission wasn’t personal. I just wanted to wrap it up and return to base. I returned to my rifle with a clear head, and open eyes.
One of the things they teach you to do in sniper training, which is reinforced through patrolling, is always to maintain situational awareness. The lieutenant was facing the door, rifle by his side, and I wasn’t worried about us being discovered. My process for acquiring Redskins was to confirm that she was still in the bedroom, in her bed (she was), then to quickly scan the area for anything that might have changed during our little chat. I was about to take and make a relatively simple four-hundred meter shot, and didn’t want anything to intrude on our escape, especially given what had happened to Chuck. I scanned the roof of her building, the surrounding area, and the window of her living room.
I hadn’t gone home for Chuck’s funeral yet. I hadn’t met his parents, watched them weep loudly by his grave. I hadn’t seen my father’s dull grey pupils dilate when I brought home his first television—sunken-cheeked, weakened by old age and feeble with the first signs of dementia, he wasn’t hunting anymore, though the weapons still hung carefully in his garage. I hadn’t finished helping the cable people set things up for the television and the internet, hadn’t stood in the backyard looking at the Ruhrs’ porch, then gone into the kitchen to grip the sink and squeeze my face shut. I was just a sniper, with a target who was going to die better than most people—painless, after a moment of physical ecstasy.
That’s when I saw the son, face plastered against the wall, hand in his boyish pants, staring through what must have been a peephole. Watching his mother. My face filled with blood. Shuddering with surprise and rage, I brought the sights up to him, then, swiftly, over to her. As she built to her climax, I pressed my cheek hard against the rifle’s buttstock, and calculated the space between us. What effect the wind would have, the angle of deflection. How her window would change the bullet’s direction. The area’s architecture—quarters built for workers, single-file hallways, wide boulevards, simple egress. I breathed in, and focused on the shot’s mathematics, and squeezed my index finger oh, so gently, feeling the narrow metal against my finger, knowing that at some point, the rifle would jerk in my hand. I began my slow exhale.
